


another inch every year

by alpacas



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/M, Gen, and as hilarious as this ship is we need to talk about it like, like boy my apologizes to nott she, listen this episode was a lot, this story is my usual angsty nonsense, wow guys, yes the pairings are what they are
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-21
Updated: 2019-11-21
Packaged: 2021-02-18 06:28:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21506650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alpacas/pseuds/alpacas
Summary: Nott drowns. Veth escapes the goblins.
Relationships: Caleb & Nott, Nott/Yeza, nott/caleb
Comments: 9
Kudos: 98





	another inch every year

**Author's Note:**

> heavily inspired by 'hands remember' by seabear.

The goblins leave them alone, mostly. Bored or uninterested. There’d been taunts and poking and prodding at first, cackling in their ugly language, but now the family is ignored. Veth and Yeza spend their time passing Luc back and forth, soothing him and trying to keep him quiet. Yeza would try and reason with the goblins at first. Shouting, asking, begging, offering. Promising himself, promising them alchemy, service, slavery: anything for the freedom of his wife and son.

Veth never offers. There’s nothing she has to trade. More than that, seeing Yeza beg — it fills her with a low ache of anger. Simmering in her belly. Doesn’t he understand? There’s no such thing as a good goblin. They don’t care. They’ll never care. They’ll die and all he’ll do is plead. Some things you can’t talk your way out of.

She has a rock. The cage has a bottom but the bottom is a lattice, she’d dug her fingers through the mud and filth and rotten leaves until she’d felt stone between her fingers. Uses it as a worry mostly, turning it around in her hands, running it up and down her forearms. It’s not large. Just granite or something, roundish, gray-blue with some orange-ish stripes. One edge is slightly pointed. That’s the one she grinds into the wooden beam of the cage, while Yeza is pleading.

She breaks a hole in the cage, not big but big enough to make bigger, big enough to creep through. They run, Veth carrying Luc. They don’t get much of a lead. They hear the monsters coming. She gives the baby to Yeza. 

She looks at him and he looks at her. What matters is their son. He has Luc. They don’t say anything. There’s no last kiss, no last embrace or touch of hands. He’s holding the baby. He runs. 

Once upon a time:

Nott never makes it out of the river. Not really. Or maybe it’s the other way ‘round, and she was born in the river, born from the slimy water. She’s not one for metaphors. Caleb might have a way of putting it, but that would mean telling him, and what would that be? 

Telling him what, exactly?

When he tells her the story of his parents, a little edge of her catches on one part. It’s not the important part, but she pokes at it in her head at night. Worries it like a hangnail. Picking at the pain. The edge is: Caleb’s memories were fake, and he never knew it. He was tricked and lied to. 

The edge is: Sometimes she lies in a filthy bed in filthy clothes and looks up at the ceiling of some inn in some place she’s never been before. Sometimes she’s outside in the dirt. Using Caleb’s ankle as a pillow, smelling his feet and sweat and so used to it she barely notices. Sometimes when she’s doing that, she thinks about a shop and a house and a man whose hands never stopped moving, whose hair was always mussed and due a cut, a blue-eyed baby, and she wonders: Did I make that up?

She tries to remember. The feeling of that body. Eyes that didn’t see in the dark, ears that didn’t move on their own. Small flat teeth. Breasts and a belly and thighs. She _itches_ , Nott does. Almost feels it and then it’s just gone. She gets a scratch on her hip and reaches for the wrong place. Bites her cheeks all the time, by accident. 

What if it’s a lie? What if she was never Veth? What if that’s just a story to make her feel better, to make her feel like she…

  
After a couple of weeks traveling together, Nott thinks she and Caleb ought to part ways. It’s not brought on by anything, except that in the morning they’d passed a pair of travelers on the road, going the other way. Caleb had nodded at them and Nott had hidden in her stolen cloak. They’d looked the two of them over, looked Nott over. Nodded. Walked on.

What had they thought? What had they thought, seeing Nott? Seeing Caleb with her? Caleb, who was handsome even though he didn’t care or try to be. Whose head was held high even if he slumped his shoulders. With his fine restless hands. With Nott. Who was Nott. Did they think less of Caleb? Did they think she was with him? A deformed daughter or sister? A freakish partner? She worries about it all day. The ways Caleb is dirtied by their association. The ways he must think of her. It gets stuck in her head. 

So they come across a random fork in the road, a weathered sign. Caleb stops to try and make out the etchings, figure out which way to go. She resolves to go the other. To say: hey! Wow! I have friends in that town… she crouches in the dirt. There in the middle of the road. Such as it is. The wagon-tracks are grassy, and she picks at a clover.

“Left, I think,” he says, shaking his head. 

“You know, I — I think I have some business, uh, I wanna go right,” she says, looking at the dirt.

“Very well,” says Caleb. “We’ll go to Kamordah.” She looks up. He sees her surprise. “I do not have pressing —“ he pauses. Sucks on his teeth. “So long as we do not head _north_ , I have nowhere to be.”

She means to tell him. He’s better off without her. He’s handsome and kind and she’s a monster. 

She doesn’t.

He wants — sort of — to… to be with her? 

She swallows. Her mouth is dry. “I was just kidding. I don’t have — we can go left.”

He looks at her. She looks at the dirt. “Alright,” says Caleb. 

  
It’s stupid. It’s so _stupid_. He reaches for her hand and her heart pounds. She looks at him in alarm: doesn’t he realize? People will laugh?

He tells her she’s smart and she feels queasy and she thinks about it for days, her stomach twisting with happy anxiety. He likes something about her. There’s something to like about her.

He hugs her. She feels warm.

He kisses her cheek. She aches.

He’s upset. He goes to her. She pats his hair, his back. Soothes and comforts. He needs her. She matters. She falls in love. 

She and Yeza get married. Have a son and plan on more.

She follows Caleb. Reaches for his hand when he offers it down to her.

  
Once upon a time:

They arrive in Felderwin. The apothecary is burnt to the ground. Luc is safe at Edith’s, but Nott finds that out only later, only after the Crownsguard casually tell her, disguised, hidden, dead, that the owner had been killed in the fire.

She falls. She loses the disguise, the spell. She shrieks and chokes and leaves the others to fix the mess, the sudden appearance of a hysterical goblin, the frightened guards, the commotion and scene. She falls and pushes and sobs and strikes. Leaves Jessie with a bruised lip she never apologizes for. But she explains. 

She tells them everything, under the influence of Caduceus’s _calm emotions_ spell. It leaves her flat and empty and sober, even when the spell fades. She tells them. How she died. How she was Veth. How she’d left her husband and son, because she was a monster and they were safe. Happier without her, happier without a goblin for a wife and mother. How she’d hoped to return someday —

Caleb squeezes her shoulder.

They bring Luc and Edith to Jester’s mother. Nott stays back and away. Let’s Jester and Fjord do the explaining. Tell the lies. She stays back. Drinks with Beau. Walks next to Yasha, who keeps quiet, tells her things, the ways she understands. Nott doesn’t talk. Doesn’t think. Doesn’t know what to do. Her son is an orphan. At least with Marion he’ll be comfortable. Taken care of. She’ll love him, she loves kids, I’ll explain, don’t worry, Jester says. Nott doesn’t care. She feels nothing.

Caleb stays close. After they leave Luc. After they to go Zadash. The Cricks killed Yeza and they swear revenge on Nott’s behalf. Hook up with Dairon. Try to find a way to stop the war, stop the Kryn from killing anyone else’s husbands. 

It’s fucked up really. It’s not like Nott had seen him in two years. He was already a widower. And now she’s wallowing around like she deserves her grief?

Caleb stays close.

Eventually she tells him. What a fuck up she is. How she should have gone home sooner. How she’s selfish and twisted. How she could have and didn’t, choose not to. How that makes it all her fault. She doesn’t say the words like that, but she doesn’t have to. Caleb gets it, the ease of self hatred. The comfort of it. All the answers, tidy and clean.

One night she gets very, very drunk on purpose. And then she kisses him. Clumsy and nearly missing his mouth, on purpose in case he reacts. He tells her she is too good — for this, for him, for more mistakes. 

She tells him to not pretend to be too good of a person for this.

No one knows. They’re always together anyway. Always sleeping in the same bedrooms. Nott’s a freak. Ugly and drunk, a killer. A breaker of families, a ruiner of lives. Responsible for her husband’s death. Abandoned her son. Caleb is too good for her. He would never deign to look at her like that. His love is pure. Platonic. A child doting on a distant parent. Clean and far away.

He is ruthless and there is grime under his nails, sweat under his arms. Tension in his bones and veins. He tells her she is better than he is. He is lying, but she needs to pretend it is true. She tells him she loves him and means it. She sends all of her money and trinkets and buttons to her orphan son.

  
Once upon a time:

  
Veth makes it out of the river days later. Cut and bruised and shaken. The Crownsguard had been looking for her corpse and found her shivering and bloody. She’s too delirious from wounds and trauma and fever to remember her reunion with her family. Sick for weeks and slow to recover.

By then, the goblins have packed up and moved camp. Crownsguard search the forest for days and come back with nothing. Neighbors bring pies and stews and remind her how lucky she is to have an alchemist for a husband. She recovers well, if slowly. They all have nightmares. Anxiety about leaving the safety of the village. Luc moves from his cot into the big bed.

But they recover.

Aida is born a year later. She resembles Veth, in looks and in temprement: she’s fussy and willful, even as an infant. Luc is pleased to be a brother. A neighbor from down the street helps watch the children. Veth and Yeza expand the shop.

Garen is born third. He resembles Yeza’s father, if anyone. He’s noisy and curious and suffers from ear infection after infection. Luc starts school. He hardly seems to remember the goblins.

Veth gets pregnant with her fourth. She tries to learn to bake. She keeps house, but Yeza is better at it. Her children are noisy and intelligent. She hopes for a second girl. She hopes they can expand the house. She hopes the shop does well. The war starts, and Humperduke is attacked. Refugees pour in to Felderwin. Yeza is given a contract with the local Crownsguard, for potions and antidotes and things. Veth worries, for herself and her children and the shop. But she worries more about the drought. The kitchen garden. Luc’s first year of school.

  
Once upon a time there was a group of evil goblins, who captured a nice man. He was so nice that he made friends with a goblin. Told her: I’ll give you anything you want. Teach you anything at all, if you help me. She wasn’t good for much. But she was nice, too. At least sort of. And she believed him.

It’s only later, weeks later, that she thinks about the lie she told the Mighty Nein. Came up naturally enough at the time, and it’s not like she regrets it. But still. It would have been nice, if it worked out like that. If Yeza had been right. 

Then Caleb calls, and she hops to her feet. He’s looking for a rock, a good rock with a lucky ring around the middle. She climbs to her feet to help. Nott does. Not Veth. Nott. 

They dig in the muddy soil with Kiri. She tells him about a man named Yeza.


End file.
